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Felix Salmon of Reuters put forth a controversial business proposition involving The New York Timesin an article yesterday: why not charge hedge funds a fee in order to receive breaking news of investigative stories a full trading day before publication?

Salmon came to this conclusion when the value of Wal-Mart’s shares plunged after the Times published an exposé over the weekend about alleged bribery of Mexican officials by the company, he said in the article.

Noting how much the piece affected the stock market, Salmon suggested that the Times could take advantage of this influence by allowing corporate clients early access to such investigative material for a price, which could supplement the paper’s losses in revenue.

“But how much would hedge funds pay to be able to see the NYT’s big investigative stories during the trading day prior to the appearance of the story?” Salmon wrote. “It’s entirely normal, and perfectly ethical, for news organizations, including Reuters, to give faster access to the best-paying customers.”

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The New YorkDaily News tabloid has launched a new online section which seeks to appeal to the city’s South Asian residents, paidContent reported.

The new section, called “Desi,” features South Asian news curated for an American immigrant audience, including stories about Bollywood, cricket and politics, the article said. The stories found on Desi are a mixture of original content and articles from the digital newswire Newscred, the article said. As we previously reported, Newscred filters content from more than 750 sources around the world, creating personalized bundles of online content for publishers.

NY Daily News Digital Senior Vice President Steve Lynas told paidContent that according to research conducted by the newspaper, second and third generation immigrants demonstrated an interest in South Asian News, but presented through an American lens.

Lynas also said that culture is more of a factor in determining what news people are interested in, implying that the notion of local news in general can be redefined, the article said.

“I don’t see a zip code as a good filter for community,” Lynas told paidContent.

McClatchy owns 30 daily papers and is the third largest US newspaper publisher. Pruitt will be succeeded by Pat Talamantes as the new CEO of McClatchy and by Kevin McClatchy as chairman, the article said.

Now, as Jeff Sonderman at Poynterpoints out, Twitter has moved one step closer to functioning as an actual wire, as a major design overhaul is set to launch a new "discover" section, which curates a personalised selection of stories based on your location, current events and who you follow.

To an extent, Twitter does this already. What are the Tweets of people you follow except personalised news? But the change means that these Tweets will be filtered to a greater extent by an algorithm that will deliver news most interesting to you.

The NSCSN followed this lead and decided to build on the common practice of swapping and sharing information between sports desks in order create a kind of swap-shop for sports content, ie a newswire that would not charge for use of its content.

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The Associate Press caused a stir in the media community when it scolded employees on Wednesday for having tweeted abut the arrests of one AP staffer and photojournalist at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York - before the news reached the official AP news wire.

Staff were told in a high priority memo which, according to NYMag, said "we've had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off".

The AP's social media handbook, which acts an employee's bible for the use of Twitter and Facebook, is very clear that journalists should not 'scoop the wire', so to speak.

This type of social media restriction is common practice for major news wires, Reuters also has a similar guidelines. From a business perspective, it makes sense to stop employees beating the wire - what good is a news wire if the information on it is old news?

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Agence France-Presse (AFP) plans to build up its brand image by boosting its Internet presence with its own destination news website and on platforms such as the iPad, its chief executive Emmanuel Hoog said, reported in an AFP article on Yahoo! News.

As discussed earlier, in order to compete with the other big news providers Associated Press and Thomson Reuters, AFP is going mobile. Investments will be made to develop the agency's presence on the web as well as on digital devices like the iPhone and the iPad.

Although AFP is the world's third largest newswire, some newspapers, like 20 Minutes, have recently decided to drop its services and this has affected the news agency's primary source of revenue.

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Reuters America will directly compete with The Associated Press, focusing on state and regional news and also using information from other sources, such as SportsDirect Inc. for sports, TheWrap.com for entertainment news, and Examiner.com for local news, The Wall Street Journal reported. The news service's first client is Tribune Co., which last year began a trial on using less AP content in order to cut costs.

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According to journalism.co.uk, the African online news company A24 has just partnered with the African Press Organization (APO). "The deal will see A24 host the APO's wire service, which includes multilingual reports and press releases from governments, political organisations and NGOs," states the article. The agency also provides a free wire service to African journalists.

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Agence France-Pressehas announced that it is to launch the world's first high definition news video service today. AFP is the world's third largest newswire, behind Reuters and the Associated Press, with 2,900 journalists worldwide.

The agency's video wire AFPTV has around 80 news gathering units around the world and distributes 1,000 new videos per month. Today's move to high definition will cover English and French videos, and over the coming weeks it will be expanded to cover those in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, German and Polish.

Interestingly, the AFP will also provide video directly formatted for the iPad. More and more news outlets have been launching applications for Apple's best-selling tablet device, which offers significant potential for multimedia innovation.

"Being the first global news agency to launch high definition videos signals AFP's continued effort to adapt to the market's latest technological advances," said the agency's chairman and chief executive, Emmanuel Hoog.

Editors Weblog

The World Editors Forum is the organization within the World Association of Newspapers devoted to newspaper editors worldwide. The Editors Weblog (www.editorsweblog.org), launched in January 2004, is a WEF initiative designed to facilitate the diffusion of information relevant to newspapers and their editors.